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The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Elizabeth Tonkin
Elizabeth Tonkin*
Affiliation:
CWAS, University of Birmingham
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Extract

What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perpetuated them embedded in performances. The indigenous occasions of performance are also easily replaced by the record of an outside researcher's chance intervention.

Oral performances of history differ--in kind, in the extent to which past events are a focus of attention, in the readiness of individuals to answer an outsider's questions, in the types and structures of recall. The patterns I describe for one Liberian community may be quite different for its ethnic neighbors. As a social anthropologist I assume that recall is not a purely individual phenomenon, and besides trying to understand what connections there may be between types of recall and types of social condition, I want to see how personal reminiscence (as well as tradition) is formulated, sustained, and recapitulated; to whom it is repeated; whether it is hinted or used overtly as a weapon. By taking these issues into account I believe we can also interpret better the historical data from oral performance, just as we need to know about all the genres of performance if we are to recognize the uses of history there may be in apparently non-historical modes.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 9 , 1982 , pp. 273 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1982

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Second International Oral History Conference, Amsterdam, 24-26 October 1980. Research has been financed by the University of Birmingham, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

References

NOTES

1. Reports on the revolutionary coup of 12 April 1980 revealed great ignorance of Liberian history. Some of the issues relevant to this paper are discussed in my “Models and Ideology: Dimensions of Being Civilised in Liberia” Holy, L. and Stuchlik, M., eds., The Structure of Folk Models (London, 1981).Google Scholar

2. Studies of Kroomen include Brooks, George E. Jr., The Kru Mariner in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Compendium (Newark, 1972)Google Scholar and Behrens, Christine, Les Kroumen de la Côte Occidentale d'Afrique (Bordeaux, 1974).Google Scholar

3. See my “Sasstown's Transformation: the Jlao Kru c. 1888-1918,” Liberian Studies Journal, forthcoming.

4. Conditions of oracy and some of their consequences for researchers are discussed in my “Implications of Oracy: An Anthropological View,” Oral History 3/1(1975), 41–49.Google Scholar

5. Comparable examples are found in Chukwuma, H., “The Oral Tradition of the Ibos” (Ph.D., University of Birmingham, 1974)Google Scholar and Plissart, X.J.M.B., “The Significance of Nmampuruli Proverbs” (Ph.D., University of Birmingham, 1978).Google Scholar

6. The Eastern Kru phonemic inventory is given in Lightfoot, N., “Tones on Kru Monosyllables,” Anthropological Linguistics (1974), 425–41.Google Scholar

7. I owe this example to Dr. Tony Green of the Leeds School of Dialect Studies.

8. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (Harmondsworth, 1973) 20, 23.Google Scholar Emphasis in original. I am not of course addressing Vansina's later work, but only this early but still influential English version.

9. Official publications include a British Government Blue Book, Papers Concerning Affairs in Liberia [Cd. 4614] (London, 1934).Google Scholar Consul Ryding's Report therein also incorporates several oral testimonies.

10. J.E. Flecker, “The Old Ships.”

11. The flattering interest of oral historians in African history seems ultimately due to Eurocentric superiority: it is not really believed that Africans have capitalist bosses, or bureaucrats just like Europe, but since it is felt improper to call them primitive tribesmen, they can be comfortably re-stereotyped as the “the people,” undifferentiated but virtuous.

12. Ranger, T., “Personal Reminiscence and the Experience of the People in East Central Africa,” Oral History, 6/1 (1978), 45–78.Google Scholar

13. An illustrative study is Murphy, W.P., “Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in Kpelle Society: Elders vs. Youth,” Africa, 50(1980), 193–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. See Brown, D.W., “Domination and Personal Regitimacy in a District of Eastern Liberia” (Ph.D., University of Manchester, 1979).Google Scholar